Clay.io

Developing games is hard. It’s even more difficult if you have to take care of all the tedious features like payment processing, achievements, leaderboards, social integration, etc. That’s why Clay.io takes care of all that for you with an easy-to-use JavaScript API. We asked Clay.io Co-founder Austin Hallock, to give us the inside scoop on the platform.

At Clay.io, we think HTML5 is a fantastic environment for developing games – we are betting on it 100%. Our goal is to help with the tedious aspects of game development: distribution and high-level features, so you can focus on developing the game itself. This post highlights how the tools we’ve created can help you conquer the world with your game development.

Gamification

It’s a bit humorous that I talk about “Gamification” for games…because, well, they’re already games. The reason I use that word is today gamification is associated with features like achievements, high scores, posting scores to Facebook and Twitter, leveling up, etc… Each of these features is often looked over by developers, but they are pivotal for retaining players.

We’ve developed an HTML5 Game API with a primary goal of making these features as simple as possible to implement. For example, to post a high score, then show the leaderboard, the code with Clay.io is:

We wanted to make it as easy as possible to integrate these features, but we also wanted them to be extremely customizable with clear documentation on how to do so.

Of course, there’s always the option of doing this in-house. For some, that makes sense and is a valid approach, but the task is trickier and more time consuming than it may seem. Various odds and ends exist for each platform: the Chrome Web Store, mobile, Windows App Store, etc… and that work can add up to be quite a bit (trust us, we know that very well) – fortunately with a single service taking care of these issues, you don’t have to, and can focus on the game itself.

Distribution

There are two approaches you can take for revenue when developing a game: 1) Developing a game to be sponsored, whether it’s exclusive, or licensed out, and 2) Developing a game to generate income itself through advertising and in-game payments. The two can overlap some, but if you’re planning on going with the second option, distribution will be a big deal for you. You make more money as your game is played by more people.

HTML5 is great because there are so many marketplaces you can get your game in: The Chrome Web Store, Windows App Store, Facebook, Mozilla Marketplace, the list goes on. Each of these marketplaces however, has their own quirky needs. For example, Facebook requires your game to be hosted over SSL, the Windows App Store requires your files to be UTF-8 with BOM, many of them require their own version of a manifest file, whether it be in JSON or XML. Clay.io takes care of all these oddities for you with our HTML5 Game Distribution exporter.

Tracking Distribution

It’s not only important to spread the seed for your game, it’s also important to see which marketplaces are most effective – it’s good to know where to focus your effort moving forward.

Clay.io automatically tracks this information if you are using are the API – you can normalize it by other metrics, meaning you can view the time spent per view on each site, or number of views per purchase, etc..

Our Own Marketplace

In addition to the tools we provide for distributing your games to these other marketplaces, we’ve also developed a marketplace exclusively for HTML5 Games. Each of the other marketplaces are great, but the main thing they lack is the ability to play games on any platform/device. The Chrome Web Store limits you to Chrome on Desktop, as do the Mozilla Marketplace and Windows App Store.

Our main goal is to help HTML5 game developers as much as possible, which means we really care what you have to say on how we can improve our products and service. With that said, please reach out to us with your comments and suggestions at contact@clay.io.

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